Top Foolishness Quotes

Favorite Foolishness Quotes

1. "Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."Author: Alfred North Whitehead

2. "An inextricable relationship between the foolishness and the selfishness is like that of an egg and a chicken. No one knows which came first and perhaps even none cares about it."Author: Anuj Somany

4. "More books, more racing and more foolishness with cars and motorcycles are in the works."Author: Brock Yates

5. "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."Author: Chinua Achebe

6. "Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them."Author: Christine De Pizan

7. "He's acting as foolish as a kitten... but then, everyone's entitled to a little foolishness once in a while."Author: Christopher Paolini

8. "In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change."Author: Cormac McCarthy

9. "It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood."Author: Cormac McCarthy

10. "The heart was a weak, changeable thing, bent on nothing but love, and there could be no more fatal mistake than to make it your master. Reason must be in charge. It comforted you for the heart's foolishness, it sang mocking songs about love, derided it as a whim of nature, transient as flowers. So why did she still keep following her heart?"Author: Cornelia Funke

11. "Politics was put in front of me. I do politics because it's the vehicle for change and because I happen to be good at it... I had this sort of calm fearlessness, that some would call foolishness."Author: David Mixner

12. "Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom."Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

14. "Wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness."Author: Hermann Hesse

15. "I would assume that you were going to offer me refreshment, but the evidence so far suggests that that would be optimistic to the point of foolishness."Author: J.K. Rowling

16. "As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more into the substance of my dreams. One may dream, and even in the midst of the dream be aware that he is dreaming, and if the dream be bad, comfort himself with the thought that it is only a dream. This is a common experience with all of us. And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, the primitive."Author: Jack London

17. "I can never be important to any one.''What is to prevent you?''Every thing — my situation — my foolishness and awkwardness."Author: Jane Austen

18. "If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness."Author: Jane Smiley

19. "As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before."Author: Jean De La Bruyere

20. "The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpation, but by the individuals. The strongest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person's decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.But history can be quite the slattern. One never knows who that person is, where he might be, or what decision he might male.It is almost enough to make me believe in destiny."Author: Jim Butcher

21. "This is stupid.""Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You think in war it must be different. Must be better. With death around the corner, men united against hardship, the cunning of the enemy, people must think harder, faster, be...better. Be heroic.Only it's just the same. In fact do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it's worse. There aren't many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they'll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There's no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more."Author: Joe Abercrombie

22. "Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or even lack of information."Author: John McCarthy

23. "He said he would not yield his judgment to anything proposed by the Church, or any individuals of the Church, or even the Great I Am, given through the appointed organ, as revelation, but would always act upon his own judgment, let him believe in whatever religion he might. He stated he would always say what he pleased, for he was a Republican, and as such would do, say, act, and believe what he pleased.Mark such republicanism as this! A man to oppose his own judgment to the judgment of God, and at the same time to profess to believe in that same God, who has said: "The foolishness of God is wiser than man; and the weakness of God is stronger, than man."[DHC3:66]"Author: Joseph Smith Jr.

24. "Call me not wise unless you call all men wise. A young fruit am I, still clinging to the branch and it was only yesterday that I was a blossom. And call none among you foolish for we are neither wise nor foolish. We are green leaves upon the tree of life and surely life itself if beyond wisdom and surely beyond foolishness."Author: Kahlil Gibran

25. "War was so many things, and not the least of which confusion. What was wrong? What was right, for that matter?Was killing right or wrong? Brave or cowardly? Human nature or unnatural behavior of creatures too smart for their own good?Loyalty, betrayal, hate, love, fear, friendship, teamwork, violence. War was connected to all of these. Hard work, sadness, suffering, discipline, chaos, questions, few answers, strategy, bravery, foolishness, death, life.And both winning and losing were only two small aspects of the word war."Author: Kenzie Kovacs Szabo

26. "If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness."Author: Kurt Vonnegut

27. "I had given up the church, more because of its complicity with slavery than from a full understanding of the foolishness of its creeds."Author: Lucy N. Colman

28. "Brother Maical's wisdom lies in knowing he is not clever and letting himself be led. The foolishness of mankind is that we do not do the same."Author: Mark Lawrence

29. "Truth is not anchored to the ground by driven piles. It can float and take to the air; it is light and lovely and delicate. It is feminine as well as masculine. It is often gentle, and sometimes it can even make a fool of itself—but when it does it calls down God (who protects weak creatures), and suddenly its foolishness becomes a blazing, piercing light."Author: Mark Helprin

30. "We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands--whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring them to attention--but to balance the ledger we are allowed to dwell on the past, revisit the sites of our old humiliations, reread (without the aid of spectacles) our own misjudgments. And we do, believing that it was there, in our past, that our last best chance for happiness lay hidden; that somewhere in that thicket, now dense with self-recrimination and foolishness, trickled a freshet of joy powerful enough to redeem us."Author: Mark Slouka

31. "Wandering alone in the barrenness of foolishness, I hear the drip-drip of Wisdom and smile."Author: Martin Cosgrove

32. "Froi saw the foolishness of dreamers, and he decided he'd like to die so foolish. With a dream in his heart about the possibilities, rather than a chain of hopelessness."Author: Melina Marchetta

33. "So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?''Love,' he explained.She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. 'I hope you choke on it,' she said, flatly."Author: Neil Gaiman

34. "He could not tell her that he was angry because she did not love him. Even he could not utter such foolishness. Certainly, he did not love her. He did not love anyone except perhaps Isaac and a very few of his other children. Yet he wanted Anyanwu to be like his many other women and treat him like a god in human form, competing for his attention no matter how repugnant his latest body nor even whether he might be looking for a new body. They knew he took women almost as readily as he took men. Especially, he took women who had already given him what he wanted of them--usually several children. They served him and never thought they might be his next victims. Someone else. Not them."Author: Octavia E. Butler

35. "When I was foolish, I detested sagacity. I ate the fruits of my foolishness and ignorance. I thank God because I was once foolish. It was from my foolishness that I learnt and understood the true savour of sagacity."Author: Ogwo David Emenike

36. "Where no paths exist, a man strays only when he misses his destination. There is no crime, no transgression, no sin save foolishness or incompetence, and no obscenity save the tyranny of custom."Author: R. Scott Bakker

37. "Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could not have known that Ella's whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway."Author: Richard Wright

38. "The maids in my village talked of falling in love with a man at first sight. That has always seemed naught but foolishness to me. Until I enter Sister Serafina's workshop. It is unlike anything I have ever seen, full of strange sights and smells, and I tumble headlong into love."Author: Robin LaFevers

39. "Every war and every conflict between human beings has happened because of some disagreement about names. It is such an unnecessary foolishness, because just beyond the arguing there is a long table of companionship set and waiting for us to sit down. What is praised is one, so the praise is one too, many jugs being poured into a huge basin. All religions, all this singing one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. Sunlight looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different on this other one, but it is still one light. We have borrowed these clothes, these time-and-space personalities, from a light, and when we praise, we are pouring them back in."Author: Rumi

40. "The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether."Author: Saul Bellow

41. "Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."Author: Sidney Hook

42. "As anyone who starts a business knows, it is a fantastic race. There is a statistic that hangs over your head - over 90 percent of all new businesses fail in the first three years. For anyone with even a bit of competitive spirit in them, especially for someone who defines himself or herself as an entrepreneur, these overwhelming odds of failure are not intimidating, they only add fuel to the fire. The foolishness of thinking that you're a part of the small minority of those who actually will make it past three years and defy the odds is part of what makes entrepreneurs who they are, driven by passion and completely irrational."Author: Simon Sinek

43. "The slaves of paltriness, the frogs in life's swamp, will naturally cry out, "Such a love is foolishness. The rich brewer's widow is a match fully as good and respectable." Let them croak."Author: Søren Kierkegaard

44. "Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world's foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world's foolishness or weep over it, you will regret it either way; laugh at the world's foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it; believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret it either way; believing a woman or not believing her, you will regret it both ways. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you'll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."Author: Søren Kierkegaard

45. "Such strength behind these eyes, that your soul glows through. Blinding. Captivating. Torturing. You may be as stubborn as a mule on a cliff side but any man would find the true meaning of foolishness to ever forget these facts."Author: Stephanie Hudson

46. "ShanTu said that we must set the soul free from the body and its lusts. Having thus got rid of the foolishness of the flesh, we shall be pure. While an admirable goal, the sisterhood has not found this practical. For whatever purpose, body and soul are joined. Denying one's bodily lusts is about as effective as prohibition, which is to say not effective at all."Author: Susan Cartwright

47. "The perfect being, huh? There is no such thing as perfect in this world. That may sound cliché, but it's the truth. The average person admires perfection and seeks to obtain it. But, what's the point of achieving perfection? There is none. Nothing. Not a single thing. I loathe perfection! If something is perfect, then there is nothing left. There is no room for imagination. No place left for a person to gain additional knowledge or abilities. Do you know what that means? For scientists such as ourselves, perfection only brings despair. It is our job to create things more wonderful than anything before them, but never to obtain perfection. A scientist must be a person who finds ecstasy while suffering from that antimony. In short, the moment that foolishness left your mouth and reached my ears, you had already lost. Of course, that's assuming you are a scientist"Author: Tite Kubo

48. "People say the truth hurts. Hell no, it hurts even more if you do a whole bunch of foolishness to try and avoid it."Author: Tyler Perry

49. "To fear an inner life, she thought, was the greatest foolishness. It was like fearing a breath of air. Why did people find it harder to admit to a universe within than without? Why trust, for a moment, one's own absurd measurement of either?"Author: Valerie Martin

50. "Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God."Author: Victor Hugo